Criminology 101 FAIL!!
Rational Choice Theory and Deterrence Theory are BUNK!
Take 2
Sorry to inundate your emails with my scribbles, but my last post was not meant to be. You see, most of my Substacks begin as LinkedIn or Facebook posts. I spit out some ideas, then I am like “wait, I need to expand on this.” So, writing happens. Unfortunately, yesterday I erred and posted the acutal LinkedIn post instead of the that it motivated me to write. So, here we go again.
Let me start with a scene that would make perfect sense if rational choice theory were actually real.
It’s 2:13 a.m. A guy is standing outside a gas station. He’s sweating, pacing, checking over his shoulder. Not because he’s doing anything especially thoughtful, but because everything in his life is on fire at the same time.
Now, according to the theory, this is the moment where he pauses and runs the numbers.
He pulls out an imaginary spreadsheet.
Column A: potential gain.
Column B: probability of getting caught.
Column C: expected sentence length.
Column D: personal risk tolerance adjusted for prior convictions.
Maybe he even whispers to himself, “Given current policing patterns and sentencing guidelines, this seems like a suboptimal move.”
And then, after careful consideration, he either proceeds or walks away like he’s choosing between mutual funds.
That’s the fantasy.
What actually happens is a lot less impressive and a lot more human. He’s broke. He’s high or about to be. He hasn’t slept. Something just went sideways. Someone needs money. He needs money. He’s not thinking about sentencing enhancements or long term consequences. He’s thinking about the next hour.
But sure, let’s pretend he’s doing calculus.
The Clean Lie We Keep Teaching
Rational choice theory survives because it’s clean. It’s neat. It makes human behavior look orderly and predictable.
People commit crime because they choose to. They weigh the risks. They decide it’s worth it.
It’s the criminological version of “everything happens for a reason,” except the reason is apparently bad math.
The problem is that this theory requires people to be operating in a world that most system involved folks have never experienced. Stable housing. Clear options. Emotional bandwidth. A functioning sense of the future.
You need all of that just to sit still long enough to make a “rational” decision.
Take any of those away and the whole framework starts to wobble. Take all of them away and it collapses completely.
And yet we keep teaching it like it’s some kind of universal truth.
Because if people are rational actors, then the system gets to be rational too. It gets to look like a fair response to bad choices instead of what it often is, which is a blunt reaction to complicated human situations.
Deterrence: The Other Half of the Fairy Tale
Now enter deterrence, rational choice theory’s equally confident cousin.
Deterrence says punishment works because people are afraid of it. If you make the consequences harsh enough, people will think twice. If you make them certain enough, people will stop altogether.
Again, sounds great. Feels intuitive. Makes for excellent political speeches.
There’s just one small issue.
It only works if the person you’re trying to deter is already behaving like a rational actor.
So now we’ve built an entire system on a double assumption. First, that people are carefully weighing decisions before committing harm. Second, that those same people are thoughtfully considering the punishment they might face and adjusting accordingly.
That’s a lot of faith in a version of human behavior that doesn’t show up very often in the real world.
Because here’s what deterrence actually runs into.
Desperation does not care about sentencing guidelines.
Addiction does not pause for a risk assessment.
Mental health crises do not factor in mandatory minimums.
Trauma does not sit down and say, “You know what, five years is a bit steep.”
If deterrence worked the way we say it does, jails and prisons would be empty by now. We’ve made the punishments harsher, longer, and more certain for decades. If fear was the answer, we would have solved this already.
Instead, we just built bigger cages.
The Reality Nobody Wants to Write Into Policy
Spend any real time talking to people who have been incarcerated and a different picture shows up.
Not one where people are calculating. One where people are reacting.
Things pile up. Money runs out. Relationships fall apart. Substances step in. Trauma never left in the first place. And then something happens.
A bad decision, sure. But not a carefully optimized one.
More like a moment where everything collapses into a single choice that feels immediate and necessary, even if it looks ridiculous from the outside.
That’s not rational choice. That’s constrained choice at best. Survival mode at worst.
And here’s the uncomfortable part.
If we admit that, then the whole idea of deterrence starts to look less like a solution and more like wishful thinking backed by punishment.
Because you can’t scare someone into stability when their life is unstable. You can’t threaten someone into clarity when everything around them is chaos.
But we keep trying.
Why We Hold On Anyway
So why do these ideas stick around?
Because they’re convenient.
They let us tell a simple story. People choose crime. We respond with punishment. Order is restored.
No need to talk about structural issues. No need to deal with inequality, access, trauma, or any of the messy things that actually shape behavior.
Rational choice theory puts responsibility entirely on the individual. Deterrence gives the system a clean justification for what it does next.
Together, they form a tidy little package.
It just happens to be wrong.
Or at least wildly incomplete in a way that matters.
The Dark Joke Underneath All of This
The real irony is that the theories themselves are not very rational.
We assume people are making calculated decisions, then act surprised when harsher punishments don’t change behavior.
We double down. Increase sentences. Add enhancements. Expand surveillance.
Then when it still doesn’t work, we say the problem is that we haven’t punished enough yet.
It’s like trying to fix a broken engine by yelling at it louder.
At some point, you have to consider the possibility that the model you’re using to understand the problem is the problem.
What Happens If We Let This Go
If we stop pretending people are acting like economists in moments of crisis, a few things become clearer.
First, prevention starts to look less like punishment and more like support. Stability matters. Access matters. Relationships matter. Those things do more to shape behavior than the distant threat of a sentence.
Second, accountability becomes a different conversation. Not softer. Just more grounded in reality. If people are not making decisions in a vacuum, then responses shouldn’t exist in one either.
Third, we stop designing systems around fear and start designing them around what actually changes behavior over time.
None of that is as simple as deterrence. None of it fits neatly into a slogan.
But it’s a lot closer to the truth.
The Bottom Line
Nobody is standing in an alley at 2 a.m. doing a cost benefit analysis before their life goes sideways.
And nobody in that moment is thinking, “You know what, the sentencing range on this is just not worth it.”
We can keep teaching that story if we want. It makes things easier to explain. It makes the system look logical.
But if the goal is to actually understand behavior and respond to it in a way that works, we have to be honest about what we’re dealing with.
And what we’re dealing with is not rational actors making neat little calculations.
It’s people, in messy situations, making decisions that rarely look anything like theory.